Monday, December 28, 2009

First, Foxhound has compile on Version 12, then it has to run properly against target databases created with versions 5.5 through 11.

What is Foxhound? It's a database monitor and schema display utility for SQL Anywhere databases, currently in development with its own beta planned for 2010.

Foxhound also has to recognize target databases created with version 12, and then it has to work properly with those target databases... it's one thing to get Foxhound to stop rejecting "12" as a database version number, quite another matter to get Foxhound to handle version 12's enhancements and behavior changes.

But, first things first: Foxhound compiles cleanly on the SQL Anywhere version 12 beta with no code changes, and it passes a simple smoke test.

Woohoo! That's no mean feat... virtually all of Foxhound is written in SQL...

80,000 lines of rather funky Watcom SQL, up from 60,000 lines a year ago,

There are a lot of little bugs in the underlying software, you've probably seen them and been just as irritated by them as I have. Feel free to report them on meta.stackexchange.com, but if you do, you'll probably see they've already been discussed... which is why I don't bother sweating the small stuff.

There are quite a few features that are "stubbed out" (not yet implemented) in the administration areas "admin", "mod" and "tools". The big one, IMO, is called "Download Your StackExchange Database". That's huge. SQLA will never go live without that one.

Not ever.

Allow me to elaborate: The creator of StackExchange just lost his entire blog because he didn't take responsibility for backing up his own data. SQLA is not my data, it is your data. It's one thing for Jeff Atwood to be careless with his own data, that's his problem. It would be an entirely different matter for me to take the same risks with your data. I don't care how safe the Fog Creek infrastructure is... blah blah blah cloud computing blah blah blah.

Until there is a reasonably convenient and absolutely reliable way for me to back up SQLA content, it ain't ever going live.

Here's what I really think: The backup problem will go away long before StackExchange goes live, and we'll be able to "pump up the volume" (invite more participation in SQLA) sometime in January or February.

That will happen before SQLA goes "live"... it will still say "govern yourself accordingly", but it'll be a lot more fun!

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Object Relational Mappers: Friend or Foe?

Object relational mappers (ORMs) such as LINQ, Hibernate, and ActiveRecord bridge the gap between the relational database world, and the object-oriented world. By abstracting the database into "virtual database objects", they let programmers develop in any language and environment that they like without ever writing a line of SQL. It sounds great, but is the ORMs sweet song actually a siren's call? This talk will put ORMs on trial to help us find the answer.

Which brings us to this webcast...

Object relational mappers (ORMs) such as LINQ, Hibernate, and ActiveRecord bridge the gap between the relational database world, and the object-oriented world. By abstracting the database into "virtual database objects", they let programmers develop in any language and environment that they like without ever writing a line of SQL. It sounds great, but is the ORMs sweet song actually a siren's call? This talk will put ORMs on trial to help us find the answer.